Praxis International 185

SYMPOSIUM ON THE MEANING OF 1989

AND THE FUTURE OF THE LEFT

COMMUNISM: A POST-MORTEM
Zygmunt Bauman

Communism died of many maladies. The gravest and least curable among
them, and the most likely to be proved congenital, was irrelevance.
Communism was made to the measure of modern hopes and promises.
Socialism’s younger, hot-headed, and impatient brother, it whole-heartedly
shared in the family trust in the wonderful promises and prospects of
modernity, and was awe-struck by the breath-taking vistas of society doing
away with historical and natural necessity and by the idea of the ultimate
subordination of nature to human needs and desires. But unlike the elder
brother, it did not trust history to find the way to the millenium. Neither was it
prepared to wait till history proved this mistrust wrong. Its war-cry was:
“Kingdom of Reason – now!”
Like socialism (and all other staunch beliefs in modern values of
technological progress, transformation of nature and a society of plenty),
communism was thoroughly modern in its passionate conviction that good
society can be only a society carefully designed, rationally managed and
thoroughly industrialised. It was in the name of those shared modern values
that socialism charged the capitalist administrators of modern progress with
mismanagement, inefficiency and wastefulness. Communism accused social-
ism of failing to draw conclusions from the charges – stopping at critique,
denunciations, and prodding where an instant dismissal of inept and corrupt
administrators was in order.
Lenin‘s redefining of the socialist revolution as a substitution for, instead of
continuation of, the bourgeois revolution, was the founding act of
communism. According to the new creed, capitalism was a cancerous growth
on the healthy body of modern progress, no more a necessary stage on the
road to a society that would embody modern dreams. Capitalists could not be
entrusted (as they once were by the founders of modern socialism, Marx and
Engels) with even the preliminary job of site-clearing, ‘melting the solids and
profaning the sacred’. As a matter of fact, the site-clearing itself was neither a
necessity, nor a job useful enough to justify the waste of time needed for its
performance. As the principles of rationally organized, good society (more
factories, more machines, more control over nature) were well known and
agreed upon, one could proceed directly to usher any society (and
particularly a society without factories, without machines, without the
capitalists eager to build them, without the workers oppressed and exploited
in the process of building) into a state designed by those principles. There was
no point in waiting till the good society arrived through the action of workers,
Praxis International 10:3/4 October 1990 & January 1991 0260-8448 $ 2.00
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fed up with the sufferings caused by the capitalist mismanagement of the

progress. As one knew what the good society would be like, to delay or even
slow down its construction was an unforgivable crime. Good society could
be, had to be constructed right away, before the capitalists had a chance to
mismanage and the workers to sample the outcomes of their mismanagement;
or, rather, its designers should take over the management of society right
away, without waiting for the consequences of mismanagement to show up.
Capitalism was an unnecessary deflection from the path of Reason.
Communism was a straight road to its Kingdom. Communism, Lenin would
say, is Soviet power together with the ‘electrification of the whole country’:
that is, modern technology and modern industry under a power conscious of
its purpose in advance and leaving nothing to chance. Communism was
modernity in its most determined mood and most decisive posture;
modernity streamlined, purified of the last shred of the chaotic, the
irrational, the spontaneous, the unpredictable.
To be fair to Lenin and other communist dreamers, we ought to recall that
the good society of the nineteenth-century economists and politicians,
disciples of Smith, Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, was not a society of
growth (difficult as it is today to comprehend), but a society of stability and
equilibrium, one of a steady, well-balanced economy, catering to all needs of
the population – not an economy beefing up and pushing to new limits the
consumptive needs and capacities. Goodness of society was to be measured
by its productive performance, by the degree of gratification of needs (given,
‘objective’, finite), not by the growing richness and spectacularity of its
consumptive display. Let us recall as well that for the political theorists and
practitioners of that century, disciplines of Hegel, Comte or Bentham, good
society was one in which individual conscience was well geared to the
‘common interest’, one in which the State acted as the supreme embodiment
and the spokesman for the interests of all, while the members of the body
politic were guided by awareness and loyalty to societal needs. Cravings and
conscience of the individuals mattered to the State and to society as a whole.
The well-being of society hung on the universal acceptance of its central
values; to be effective, the body politic had to legitimize itself in terms of
those shared values (which meant that the values shared had to be those
defended and pursued by the leaders of society and the organs of their
leadership).
Let us also recall that long after the communist adventure started, the
memories of such nineteenth-century vision found their most monumental
codification in the theoretical system of Talcott Parsons. Even at such a late
date this vision had been accepted on both sides of the capitalist/communist
divide as the crowning of modern sociology, the culmination of social-
scientific wisdom, the long-awaited universal framework for analysis and
comprehension of social, economic and political realities. That theoretical
system viewed society from the vantage point of the managerial office (that
is, it posited society as first and foremost a managerial problem). It
represented equilibrium as the supreme requisite and tendency of a social
system, universal acceptance of value-clusters as the supreme means to that
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function‘s fulfilment, the coordination of individual and societal needs as the

most conspicuous measure of a society’s equilibrium, and the needs
themselves (in tune with virtually all psychological teachings and the whole of
the received humanistic wisdom) as unpleasant states of tension and anxiety
which would cease to exist at the moment of needs-satisfaction.
Finally, let us recall that well into the advanced stages of the communist
experiment the capitalist world watched its progress with bated breath,
having little doubt that however wanting the emerging system might have
been in other respects, it was a managerial and economic success. What
counted for this overt or tacit admiration was that the productive capacity of
that society fast shortened the distance dividing it from the older and
wealthier economies of the West. Giant steel mills (the more gigantic the
better) and grandiose irrigation schemes (the vaster the better) were still
accepted as the credible index of a well-managed society on the way to
fulfilment of its mission: the satisfaction of the needs of its members. The
communist state, in its own and admittedly unprepossessing way, seemed to
serve the same ideals of the modern era which even its capitalist haters
readily recognized as their own.
In these now uncannily distant times the audacious communist project
seemed to make a lot of sense and was taken quite seriously by friends and the
foes alike. Communism promised (or threatened, depending on the eye of
the beholder) to do what anyone else was doing, only faster (remember the
alluring charm of convergence theories?). The real doubts appeared when
the others stopped doing i t , while Communism went on chasing now
abandoned targets; partly by inertia, but mostly for the fact that – being
Communism in action – it could not do anything else.
In its practical implementation, Communism was a system one-sidedly
adapted to the task of mobilizing social and natural resources in the name of
modernization: the nineteenth-century, steam and iron ideal of modern
plenty. It could – at least in its own conviction – compete with capitalists, but
solely with capitalists engaged in the same pursuits. What it could not do and
did not brace itself to do was to match the performance of the capitalist,
market-centred society once that society abandoned its steel mills and coal
mines and moved into the postmodern age (once it passed over, in Jean
Baudrillard’s apt aphorism, from metallurgy to semiurgy. Stuck at its
metallurgical stage, Soviet communism, as if to cast out devils, spent its
energy on fighting wide trousers, long hair, rock music and any other
manifestations of semiurgical initiative).
Heller, Feher and Markus defined the communist society as dictatorship
over needs: and this it was, though only in that later, ‘postmodern’, stage; the
dictating of needs became an abomination per se, regardless of the degree to
which the needs experienced by its objects had been provided for. This
happened because the society that throughout its modern development
viewed itself as a social arrangement aimed at the production capable of
matching established needs, in its capitalist version turned consciously,
explicity and joyously to the production of new needs. Once seen as the state
of suffering demanding reprieve, needs became now something to be
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celebrated and enjoyed. Human happiness had been re-defined as the

expansion of one’s consuming capacity and the cultivation of new, more
capacious and ever more refined needs.
For the social system, this meant that balanced economy would no longer
do that, and constant growth was needed instead. For the individual, this
meant choice as the foremost criterion of good life and personal success.
Choice of the kind of person one would like to become (ever new personality-
assembling kits are offered in the shops), choice of pleasures one would like
to enjoy, choice of the very needs one would like to seek, adopt and gratify.
Choice has turned into a value in its own right; the supreme value, in fact.
What mattered now was that choice be allowed and made, not the things or
states that are chosen. And it is precisely for choice that Communism, this
dictatorship over needs, could not and would not ever provide – even if it
could provide for the needs it itself dictated (which more often than not it
spectacularly failed to do anyway).
Well fed and clad, educated and cossetted young East German
professionals stampeding to the West did not pretend to be running away
from disliked political philosophy; when pressed by the journalists, they
admitted that what they were after (and what they could not get in the
country they abandoned) was a wider assortment of goods in the shops and
wider selection of holidays. On my recent visit to Sweden I was told by quite a
few even better fed, clad and otherwise provided for intellectuals that –
supremely efficient as it prides itself to be – the bureaucracy of the social-
democratic state becomes ever more difficult to live with; and this due to the
limits it puts on individual choice. I asked my conversationalists whether,
given choice, they would abandon the doctor currently assigned by the
National Health, or seek another school for their children. No, was the
answer; the doctor is excellent, and so is the school our children attend; why
on earth should we go elsewhere? But, they told me in the next sentence, I
missed the point. Quite obviously, the point was not the quality of doctor or
school, but the gratifying feeling of self-assertion, expressed in the act of
consumer choice. This is what no bureaucratic provision, however lavish,
could offer.
Even if Communism could hope (erroneously, as it turned out in the end) to
out-modernize the modernizers, it has become apparent that it cannot
seriously contemplate facing the challenge of the postmodern world. The
world in which consumer choice is simultaneously the essential systemic
requisite, the main factor of social integration and the channel through which
individual life-concerns are vented and problems resolved – while the state,
grounding its expectation of discipline in the seduction of the consumers
rather than indoctrination and oppression of the subjects, could (and had to)
wash its hands of all matters ideological and thus make conscience a
private affair.
Thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns
which communism could not but collectivize (thus addressing all grievances
to the state, having politicized them on the way) has been the main factor that
rendered the postmodern society so spectacularly immune to the social
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dissent to which the communist version of the modern state proved to be so

eminently vulnerable. It is not necessarily the case that the denizens of
postmodern – privatized and commodified – society enjoy a greater sum-total
of happiness (one would still wish to know how to measure happiness
objectively and compare it), and that they experience their worries as less
serious and painful. What does truly matter is that it would not occur to them
to lay the blame for such troubles they may suffer at the state’s door, and even
less to expect the remedies to be handed over through that door. The
postmodern society proved to be a well-nigh perfect translating machine -
one that interprets any extant and prospective social issue as a private
concern (as if in a direct defiance of C. Wright Mills’s very modern, very pre-
postmodern description of, simultaneously, good democracy and good social
science). It is not the ‘ownership of means of production’ that has been
privatized (its ‘private’ character, to be sure, is ever more in doubt at the age
of the mergers and the multinationals). The most seminal of privatizations
was that of human problems and of the responsibility for their resolution.
The politics that reduced its acknowledged responsibilities to the matters of
public safety and otherwise declared its retreat from the tasks of social
management, effectively de-socialized the ills of society and translated social
injustice as individual ineptitude or neglect. Such politics is insufficently
attractive to awaken the citizen in a consumer; its stakes are not impressive
enough to make it an object of the kind of anger that would be amenable to
collectivization. In the postmodern society of consumers, failure rebounds in
guilt and shame, not in political protest. Perhaps it triggers off all the familiar
behavioural symptoms of Nietzsche-Scheler’s ressentiment, but politically it
disarms and gestates apathy.
Dissent is de-politicized, dissolved into yet more personal anxieties and
concerns and thus deflected from the centres of societal power to private
suppliers of consumer goods. The gap between desirable and achieved states
of happiness results in the increased fascination with the allurements of the
market and appropriation of commodities; the self-propagating mechanism
of consumer-oriented economy is thereby lubricated, while political and
social structures emerge unscathed and intact. With the definitions and
particularly the avenues and mechanisms of social mobility privatized, all
potentially explosive troubles (like frustrated personal ambitions, humiliating
refusals of the public confirmation of self-definitions, blocked channels of
advancement, even eviction from the sphere in which job-ascribed, publicly
recognized meanings and identities are distributed), lead at best to a still
more feverish search for market-supplied prescriptions, skills and tools of
self- or image-improvement, or they finish up in the disconsolate resignation
of the welfare recipient – that socially confirmed paragon of personal
incompetence and impotence. In neither case are the outcomes invested with
political meanings. Privatised ambitions pre-define frustration as an equally
private matter, singularly unfit to be re-forged into a collective griev-
ance.
The communist dictatorship over needs and monopoly over the means and
procedures of needs-satisfaction makes the communist state an obvious
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target of individual disaffection, but it cannot but collectivize individual

frustrations in the same way it collectivized the vehicles of gratification.
Here, the state is the agency to which complaints are addressed as naturally
and matter-of-factly as have been the expectations of better life. Unlike in
the postmodern world of privatized choices, the sources of diffuse
unhappiness are not themselves diffuse and cannot be kept ex-directory; they
are publicly announced, conspicuous and easy to locate. Admittedly, the
communist regimes excelled in stifling the flow of information and pushed to
elsewhere unknown heights the art of state secrecy, and yet they proved to be
much less successful than market-oriented societies in dissipating and hiding
the responsibility for socially produced ills, for irrational consequences of
rational decisions and for overall mismanagement of social processes. They
even failed to hide the fact of hiding information and thus stood accused, as of
political crimes, of the kind of ‘cover up’ which market agencies of consumer
society practice daily, effortlessly and without attracting attention (still less a
public outcry).
Privatization of conscience – another accomplishment of the postmodern
era – exposed one more fatal weakness of the communist regimes. For a
prolonged period of their history, communist regimes remained dependent
on the outdated institution of ideological legitimation as the primary vehicle
of social integration. (Whenever relied upon, legitimation tends to be
supplemented by political oppression and persecution, ferocious and often
gory cultural crusades, thought control and casting all opposition as heresy
and political crime.) Because of that reliance, and to their embarrassment
and fury, communist regimes stayed captives of the ideological branch of the
knowledge class. Communism could not but lift the intellectuals (‘the
creative intelligentsia’) to the position of strategic systemic importance and
thereby cast them as the buttress and simultaneously, the constant threat to
the prerogatives of political managers. The political rulers could not assault,
refute or denigrate the significance of intellectual function without by the
same token sapping their own political claims and entitlements; for this
reason, they were permanently hostages to the intellectuals’ compliance and
willingness to cooperate. Hence the paradox of the suppression of free
thought (amounting to the expropriation of the intellectuals, as a class, of
their social function) combined with the uniquely strong bargaining position
of the victims.
The paradoxical nature of the rulers‘ status vis-a-vis the intellectuals was
reflected in the ambiguous stance of the intellectuals towards the rulers.
Intellectuals had to rebel time and again in the name of the self-same
professional function which made them so important to the state in the first
place (‘we must be allowed to create freely to be of use to the state’, went the
frequently heard argument); and yet they enjoyed elsewhere unparalleled
state patronage, lavished on the arts, creative writing and culture in general as
a reward for present and future docility, but all the more generous for the
poorly concealed dependence of the regime on intellectual services.
Oppression of free thought was a round-about recognition of the supreme
relevance of intellectual work; a perverted accolade, an underhand tribute to
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a function the intellectuals, as a class, have long ago ceased to perform on the
other side of the great political divide.
This play of repulsion and mutual attraction could, however, go on only for
the duration of the ‘primitive accumulation of authority’. Once firmly in the
saddle and supported by the institutionalized mechanisms of self-perpetua-
tion, the communist rulers felt less pressure to play the card of ideological
legitimation. They could now withstand (or so they thought) the loosening of
the link that bound them traditionally to the intellectual services. Insult was
added to injury; already constrained in the exercise of their freedom,
intellectuals found the very relevance of their work slighted. The demands of
more scope argued in terms of ‘you need us’ now cut little ice and thus proved
to be even less effective than before.
As for the intellectuals, they perceived the new situation as the decisive
break in communication; as the end to the conversation and bargaining
between creative intelligentsia and the political rulers. Constraints imposed
on thought and expression could not be anymore, however perversely,
exonerated or made bearable. In ever greater numbers the intellectuals
refused to cooperate, however obliquely, with the rulers. Unlike in
postmodern societies, with their de-politicization of intellectual dissent
through the far-reaching privatization of needs and consciences (and the
privatization of censorship by leaving it to the discretion of scattered
commercial agencies), intellectual refusal to cooperate became a political
dynamite under conditions of a dictatorship over needs. Here, it articulated
itself as political opposition; as a challenge to the basic principles of the
regime – to the very system of the communist rule. Unsweetened by state-
sponsored adulation and admittedly disconnected from political relevance of
intellectual functions, constraints upon intellectual freedom came to be
experienced, as they should and always do, as unjustifiable and unendurable.
But unlike the constraints upon creative freedom induced by the market and
administered by the cultural managers of private corporations, this particular
deprivation (like all other deprivations suffered under the communist
regime) could be and promptly was addressed to a well-defined culprit and
represented as a political crime. Disaffection of the intellectuals could not
but become a political rebellion.
To sum up: Communism attracts, condenses, politicizes and turns against
itself the popular disaffection that the postmodern, market-led society
successfully deflects from its power institutions, disperses and de-politicizes.
This is the basis of the irreparable technical inferiority of the communist
version of modernization and of the inevitability of its fall. It was the advent
of postmodernity, with its shifting of concerns from the productive to the
consumptive sphere and its thorough privatization of needs, identities and
consciences, that delivered the mortal blow to the communist adventure and
spelled its demise.
All this is, of course, only the ‚formal cause‘ of the recent dismantling of
the communist regimes, certainly not its ‘efficient cause’. Social formations
do not fall just because they are irrational or technically inferior. Their
technical inefficiency merely makes them vulnerable in the face of pressures
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that more often than not arise from extrinsic sources, are but obliquely
related to managerial troubles, and rarely address themselves directly to the
issue of the system’s technical ineptitude. The technical inferiority of
Communism explains why the system proved to be so conspicuously ‘accident
prone’ and such an exceptionally high insurance risk, why it invited targeted
blows and – once the blows had been delivered – could not resist them for
long.
As it happened, the blows (even if aimed at the same target) came from
diverse quarters and were motivated by diverse reasons. To start with, East-
European Communism was not only an alternative form of modernization,
but also an equally obsolete, alternative version of early-modern colonialism.
Suppressed nationalisms lent integrity and purpose to the rebellion against
Communism, having construed it as first and foremost a foreign intrusion and
a mark of the alien rule (the Great-Russian nationalism, which for obvious
reasons cannot fight back under the slogans normally deployed by the
conquered and colonized nations, resorted to the well-tried denigration of
the oppressive regime as Jewish conspiracy). Powerful as it was in its own
right, the nationalist factor was accompanied and reinforced by the new
(and more acute than in the past) threats to the already low standards of
living, caused by inept responses of the inert regime to the challenge of the
last world-wide depression, by pressures of the intensified armaments race,
by a series of planning errors and miscalculations, and by slow yet relentless
dissipation of the ‘work ethic’ – all in addition to the general clumsiness of the
command economy. There were more than enough causes for widespread
discontent, with virtually every group and category of the population adding
its own grudges and frustrations to the common pool of accusations focusing
upon the communist state and system of social management. The point is,
however, that the unique concentration of diverse discontents, through their
convergence on one well defined, undisguised and obvious target, added
considerably to their collective strength and assured them of the effectiveness
they would not necessarily possess in another socio-political framework.
The collapse of Communism did not by itself prove that it was bound to
produce more discontent, and more intense discontent, than those its
modern alternatives are notorious for. It did prove, however, that
Communism is by necessity much worse equipped to cope with such
discontent than it generates. One advantage of capitalism in its postmodern
version, most conspicuously demonstrated in recent confrontation, is first
and foremost of a technical-systemic nature: it resides in the degree of
protection against dissent that Communism proved incapable of even
remotely approximating. Whatever might be the other, ideological and
moral, objections raised politically against the communist rule, the
communist project of grand social engineering collapsed ultimately because
of the tendency of centrally managed systems to accumulate, rather than
disperse and deflect, social discontent – and ultimately to condense it into an
adverse power they cannot contain or resist.

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